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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Apples',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/06/30.jpg" alt="A partly-built house" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Some of the stories mentioned in the Atlantic article seem like they might be interesting, but they don&apos;t seem to involve a search for meaning in one&apos;s life and culture so much as searching for an alternate reality.
			I&apos;m not sure why the discussion assignment is trying to tie these very different concepts together.
			I have a wild imagination and often fantasise about other worlds, but it&apos;s not something I actually believe in.
			I don&apos;t even believe in an afterlife world.
			As far as I can tell, when we die, we just break down into our component parts.
			There is no more.
			It&apos;s one of the main reasons I will never have children: by creating life, we are sentencing that life to one day die.
			Ceasing to exist seems like a worse fate to me than never having existed at all.
			When you die, you lose everything, but when you never lived, you never had anything to lose.
			No memories, no experiences, no personality ...
			Charles Simic&apos;s story is much more grounded in reality.
			I can kind of relate, though not really.
			We both came from not-so-great childhoods.
			Though while I came from a toxic home, he came from an area ravaged by war.
			Having leave his home behind frequently to avoid being bombed had to have been much harder on his sense of security than anything I experienced.
		</p>
		<p>
			Most of the time, I don&apos;t search for meaning in my life and culture.
			I already have it, and yet at the same time, I can never have it.
			The way my mind works is a bit of a paradox.
			Because we all die and everything we are vanishes forever, I feel our lives can never have any real meaning.
			After all, everything we are and will be is just going to be lost anyway.
			We are meaningless; we are mere chemicals and energy playing out in some random world with no purpose.
			And yet, on a day to day basis, I act as though our lives do have meaning.
			Though I shouldn&apos;t care about anything, because none of it actually matters, I very much do care.
			My &quot;meaning&quot; for life tends to stay rather static though, until something happens to disrupt my view of the world.
			At that point, I tend to go into an existential crisis for a while until I can match my &quot;meaning&quot; to my newfound perception.
			I usually emerge with a very different view on something &quot;big&quot;.
			I guess before around 2012, I didn&apos;t really care about culture, so I certainly didn&apos;t search for meaning in it.
			At this point though, the only conclusion I have about culture is that ours is toxic and is holding back humanity.
			People would rather compete with one another than work together for a better future for all ...
			Most people would, anyway.
			I choose not to be a part of popular culture for that reason, though there are so many subcultures available that nearly everyone can find one they fit in with.
			It&apos;s hard to say there&apos;s any meaning in this though, as with so many subcultures, you can&apos;t really say that a certain one is &quot;truer&quot; or &quot;more meaningful&quot; than the others.
			It&apos;s all just people wanting to find a community they fit in with, a primal urge driven by our animal brains.
			It&apos;s part of how we survived in the past, so the instinct to find community has been evolved into our very cores.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			There are multiple theories on time travel.
			For example, maybe changes made in the past will alter the present you go back to.
			This is the case in such stories that involve the butterfly effect.
			If this is the case, Bruno could no doubt go back and kill his own grandfather before his father was conceived.
			But then, you does Bruno cease to exist?
			If Bruno&apos;s grandfather never had children, Bruno could never be born.
			But if Bruno was never born, Bruno&apos;s grandfather wouldn&apos;t&apos;ve died too early to have children, so Bruno would be born, which means the grandfather would die before having children.
			So how does causality deal with such cases in which it is impossible for the timeline to be entirely consistent?
			The video suggests the concept of universe-hopping being a replacement for time travel, but it could very well be the <strong>*result*</strong> of time travel.
			Perhaps changing the past causes the timeline to branch, with the traveller coming from the original branch and the changed reality being the new branch.
			In fact, it&apos;s entirely possible that the old branch ends at the point of departure.
			The old world and everyone in it just disappear; die; cease to be.
			It&apos;s also possible that whomever Bruno tracked down wasn&apos;t his grandfather.
			Maybe it was his grandfather&apos;s twin, who Bruno had never heard about, due to this twin dying long before Bruno was born.
			Why did he die early in life?
			Well, because Bruno killed him, mistaking him for his grandfather.
			In that case, the time travel instance was accounted for in the initial and only version of the timeline.
			If this is the case, then no, while Bruno could kill penguin in his sights, he would have still failed to kill his own grandfather.
			There&apos;s also the view that if you alter the past, it&apos;ll turn out that you were always the cause of what you tried to prevent, but that doesn&apos;t really apply to the grandfather paradox.
			Killing your grandfather so you&apos;ll never be born isn&apos;t going to cause you to somehow exist and go back to kill your grandfather later.
		</p>
		<p>
			When I was a child, I used to imagine time travel stories.
			Of particular note from such fantasies, it was known that time travel could shred reality and destroy it.
			Particularly, time would continue after an instance of time travel, creating what happened next in the altered reality.
			This altered timeline could in course involve time travel.
			If it didn&apos;t, it wouldn&apos;t be consistent with the original timeline, meaning it couldn&apos;t cause itself, and the timeline would have to revert.
			After reverting, it&apos;d of course revert back to the altered time line because in said original timeline, the altered timeline would necessarily be created.
			This would continue back and forth until reality was essentially shaken apart.
			On the other hand, if your new time line could lead to a point in which two consecutive iterations matched, all iterations after would match as well.
			You&apos;d have a stable, self-causing timeline, and that would retroactively have always been the timeline in place.
			The key to time travel, then, was to make sure to cause your initial mission to still need to be completed.
			You needed to make it look like you failed.
			Alternatively, if the mission was to gather information or to sightsee, you probably wouldn&apos;t prevent your future self from embarking on the mission by having already done it, so things would probably work out fine.
			To prevent a complete destruction of reality in this view of time travel, I always imagined the time machine would blow up if causality was to be violated in irreparable ways.
			In other words, reality would be saved because the time machine would fail.
			Under this view of time travel, Bruno would fail to kill his grandfather because he&apos;d fail to make it to the past in the first place.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Ancient Orchard</h2>
	<p>
		I think I&apos;ve decided on the main layout for my apple tree temple in Minetest.
		I&apos;ll call it the Ancient Orchard.
		In addition to the main Great Apple Tree in the centre, there&apos;ll be four lesser giant trees in the corners.
		I&apos;ll probably build a wooden wall between the two trees on each side, providing a nice barrier so the sudden dirt area won&apos;t look so strange. Dirt&apos;ll be on the inside, sand on the outside.
		(If you read yesterday&apos;s entry, you&apos;ll know the location of this orchard is a sandy beach area.)
		Inside, there&apos;ll probably be apple trees covering most of the area, in neat rows.
		Thus, why it&apos;ll be called an orchard.
		It&apos;ll be ancient due to how old it&apos;d have to be for some of the trees to get that large, though apple trees don&apos;t actually tower 128 metres into the air like the central tree will.
		The orchard will me meant to be awe-inspiring, not realistic.
		I might add some other things besides the trees and the rails within the wall, but I&apos;m undecided as to what.
		The balcony on the central tree is probably still a go, but it might not be if the leaves from the lesser great trees crown that area too much.
		It&apos;d be nice to use the balcony as a spawn location, and there could be unlocked chests on it for gift items between players.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;m still at a loss as to how to make the wooden walls look great though.
		Each of the four walls is probably going to be sixteen metres tall and ninety-six metres wide, so there&apos;ll be a big space to look at.
		A bare wall probably won&apos;t cut it.
		Maybe I&apos;ll use a fence instead.
		I worry too that having too much space within the wall dedicated to trees might be boring as well.
		I might need to find something else to add to spice it up.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
